Thomas De Witt, the youngest son, still ministers to the largest church in Protestant Christendom.  What a river of blessing has flowed from that humble, cottage well-spring.  The wilderness and the parched land have been made glad by it.  The desert has been made to rejoice and blossom as the rose.  The courses thereof have gone out into all the earth, and the tossing of its waves have been heard to the end of the world.

In November, 1865, Dr. T. De Witt Talmage preached a sermon on “The Beauty of Old Age"[*] from the words in Eccles. xii. 5, “The Almond Tree shall flourish.”  It was commemorative of his father, David T. Talmage.  He says:  “I have stood, for the last few days, as under the power of an enchantment.  Last Friday-a-week, at eighty-three years of age, my father exchanged earth for heaven.  The wheat was ripe, and it has been harvested.  No painter’s pencil or poet’s rhythm could describe that magnificent sun setting.  It was no hurricane blast let loose; but a gale from heaven, that drove into the dust the blossoms of that almond tree.

  [Footnote *:  This sermon gives so graphic and tender a portrayal of the
  father of one of America’s most distinguished ministerial families, that
  the author feels justified in making so lengthy an extract.]

“There are lessons for me to learn, and also for you, for many of you knew him.  The child of his old age, I come to-night to pay an humble tribute to him, who, in the hour of my birth, took me into his watchful care, and whose parental faithfulness, combined with that of my mother, was the means of bringing my erring feet to the cross, and kindling in my soul anticipations of immortal blessedness.  If I failed to speak, methinks the old family Bible, that I brought home with me, would rebuke my silence, and the very walls of my youthful home would tell the story of my ingratitude.  I must speak, though it be with broken utterance, and in terms which seem too strong for those of you who never had an opportunity of gathering the fruit of this luxuriant almond tree.

“First.  In my father’s old age was to be seen the beauty of a cheerful spirit.  I never remember to have heard him make a gloomy expression.  This was not because he had no conception of the pollutions of society.  He abhorred everything like impurity, or fraud, or double-dealing.  He never failed to lift up his voice against sin, when he saw it.  He was terrible in his indignation against wrong, and had an iron grip for the throat of him who trampled on the helpless.  Better meet a lion robbed of her whelps than him, if you had been stealing the bread from the mouth of the fatherless.  It required all the placidity of my mother’s voice to calm him when once the mountain storm of his righteous wrath was in full blast; while as for himself, he would submit to more imposition, and say nothing, than any man I ever knew.